Effects of Concurrent Articulation on Reading Japanese Kanji and Kana Words

Abstract

In written Japanese, there are two types of scripts: logographic kanji and syllabic kana. Three experiments investigated effects of concurrent articulation on decisions about words that are normally written in kanji either presented in kanji or transcribed in kana. Concurrent articulation disrupted rhyme decisions and homophone decisions for the kanji condition more than for the kana-transcribed condition (Experiments 1 and 2) and did not disrupt lexical decisions in either the kanji condition or the kana-transcribed condition (Experiment 3). The results were interpreted as indicating that concurrent articulation does not disrupt the generation of assembled phonology in Japanese, consistent with findings using English materials.

The nature of orthographic–phonological and orthographic–semantic relationships for Japanese kana and kanji words

“…Finally, in contrast to Kimura's (1984) findings, Kinoshita and Saito (1992) observed no effect of concurrent articulation for either kanji words or the hiragana transcriptions in their lexical decision experiment. In order to make a correct "word" decision, presumably, a lexical representation would have to be selected.…”

“…Consistent with the original assumption that lexical/ semantic coding is carried out directly from orthography for kanji words but is always mediated by phonology for kana-written words, Kimura (1984) reported that performance in a relatedness judgment task was more disrupted by concurrent articulation for hiragana transcription pairs than for the original kanji word pairs. Using a lexical decision task, however, Kinoshita and Saito (1992) reported no effect of concurrent articulation for either the original kanji words or their hiragana transcriptions. Further, because the larger effect of concurrent articulation for the hiragana transcription pairs in Kimura's study could be accounted for in terms of the increased semantic ambiguity for hiragana transcription pairs, it is not at all clear that Kimura's data have much to say about the nature of lexical/semantic coding differences for kana and kanji words.…”

“…As a result of the null effect of concurrent articulation for both kanji words and hiragana transcriptions in their experiments, Kinoshita and Saito (1992) suggested an alternative explanation for the greater effect of concurrent articulation for kana transcription pairs in Kimura's (1984) study. In particular, when a kanji word is transcribed into kana, the kana transcriptions tend to be semantically ambiguous because there are a number of homophones among Japanese kanji words, such as 教会 (church, /kjo.uka.i/) and 境界 (boarder, /kjo.u-ka.i/).…”

The Effects of Differential Timing in the Introduction of Japanese Syllabaries on Early Second Language Development in Japanese

“…READING IS ONE OF THE PRIMARY AREAS OF research in Japanese as a first language (L1) and second language (L2) (Everson, 1992;Goryo, 1987;Koda, 1996). Because the Japanese writing system is extremely complex, consisting of two types of syllabic writing systems (hiragana and katakana) and Chinese characters (kanji), the processing and acquisition of Japanese scripts have been extensively studied (Chikamatsu, 1995(Chikamatsu, , 1996Flores d'Arcais & Saito, 1990;Harada, 1988;Hatasa, 1989;Kinoshita & Saito, 1992;Mori, 1998;Morikawa, 1985;Shimamura, 1987).…”

“…That is, they were asked to speak aloud an irrelevant sequence of sounds while making a judgment. This task disrupts the articulatory/auditory channel because it interferes with the phonological code, but it leaves the visual code unaffected (Baddely & Lewis, 1981;Besner, Davis, & Daniels 1981;Besner, 1987;Kinoshita & Saito, 1992). Kimura found that concurrent vocal interference impairs the performance for kana words but not for kanji words, and concluded that vocal interference disrupts prelexical phonological coding in kana.…”